Fashion By Emo

I’m a jeans-shirt-jacket fellow, although you’ll never see me wear a suit of white. I just happen to like black and grungy-themed shirts, and I feel naked without a jacket. Yet if there’s anything I hate more than hip-hop attire that you would expect to see on a man with multiple circumcisions, it’s the get-up of the emo loser kid.

So pardon me while I play to the role of an asshole.

To look well within the stereotype of emo-ness, you have to build up your look. It’s not about what music you listen to on your giant CDR-King earphones connected to your pissant 128 MB Starmall MP3 player, but what you wear that makes you a perfect example of the decay of Filipino mass culture.

One of the things I don’t understand about emo fashion is that stupid-looking Kevin Federline hat. I always thought that emo was about that Quixotic struggle for unrequited romance and the ennui and angst that comes with it, but what’s up with the fedora?

Do the emos have a one-up on us when it comes to free open-source software? Do the emos wear those big-ass headphones to hide the fact that they’re listening to the off-sync beats of K-Fed (or was that Fed-Ex) singing “Popozão?”

I do not know, but I doubt you’ll be listening to The Red Jumpsuit Aparratus, Sunny Day Real Estate, or Saosin (how they come up with these names, I do not know) while looking like a reject backup dancer for a K-Fed music video. If you get rejected for that, and still manage to end up being rejected by a girlfriend that was never yours to begin with, then maybe you do have the right to do some wrist-slashing, or whatever it is you emo kids do. Last I checked, this country is still a democracy.

Being a 23-year-old fogey, I also do not understand scarves. There must be a semiotic quality to it, something poetic like, “I hate myself for losing that girl, so I’m going to eventually tighten up this scarf and asphyxiate myself because my life is not worth living. Said scarf, though, was made popular by more than a couple Filipino broadcast journalists:

Abner Mercado: Host of “The Correspondents,” Mercado was said to wear this scarf as a form of public identification.

Ed Lingao: Former host of “The Correspondents,” Lingao used to wear a sniper’s cloak when he was covering the Iraq war in behalf of ABS-CBN.

Is there something remotely emo about journalism? Hmmm… a change of career plans is necessary. Maybe a really itchy scarf is a very good option for a cilice, that you’re hiding goiter, or you’re warming up the vocal cords for a gig in front of a couple dozen 21st century beatniks who stare at urinal cake sugar cubes dissolving into something that passes for absinthe.

I suppose that if you’re stuck listening to Led Zeppelin, The Sex Pistols, Cypress Hill, and Rage Against the Machine, you don’t really understand a lot about emo wear. Like those skinny jeans: are they supposed to crush your testicles, or did you in fact neuter yourself with rubber bands? Self-mutilation is a big part of emo, and I suppose doing the capon routine on your own… cock, would be a much more cathartic alternative to disposable razor blades.

You’d get it once you get hold of a couple of rubber bands and a barbecue stick.